


Breed of Lost

by raspberrylimonade



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Chimera Lydia, F/M, Lydia-centric, Nerd Lydia, Season 5 AU, canon character death, minor Stalia, moderate burn stydia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2018-12-24 23:43:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12023574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberrylimonade/pseuds/raspberrylimonade
Summary: Lydia Martin moves to Beacon Hills right before senior year. Strange things start happening soon after.a Chimera Lydia AU





	1. Introduction: Bones Interred in the Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, welcome to my latest fic. Yes I have like 3 other multi-chaptered fics that I haven't finished, but with my writer's block affecting my progress with those, it seemed like the right time to share this story. I have been planning this since the hiatus between 5a and 5b. I probably put the most preparatory work into this fic out of everything I have written so far.
> 
> Special thanks to Karolina ([mieczyslyds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mieczyslyds)) for helping me brainstorm for a title.
> 
> As always, I am [raspberrylimonade](http://raspberrylimonade.tumblr.com/tagged/par-moi) on tumblr and stlnskissmartin on twitter. Feel free to chat or ask me questions on those platforms!

Lydia was attacked by some wild animal two years ago. She was found bleeding out near the road and was sent to the hospital where she stayed unconscious for almost two weeks. She had blood transfusions and skin grafting. There’s still a scar on the left side of her torso.

She should be more afraid of moving to Beacon Hills, a small town with an unprecedented number of strange incidents. Several within the compound of her new school, in fact. But her mother found a job at the high school and Lydia is desperate for a fresh start, a place where no one stares at her when she walks down the hallways, murmuring as she passes.

* * *

She half-regrets attending senior scribe. Most of it is queuing up to vandalise a library shelf. She just wants to get a good night’s sleep before the first day of school, but she supposes scribbling her name down on school property will yield some form of minor satisfaction, like she is going to leave a mark here. Damn right, Lydia Martin wants to leave a mark on the world, starting with this school.

After she is done, she studies the scribbled names and initials of the students in the queue before her as she makes her way down the row, wondering if she will meet any of them. Most students have written only their initials, though there are a number of full names interspersed here and there, including one long monstrosity she can’t pronounce. It might be Polish, but she’s moved on before she can dwell on it.

* * *

Lydia is familiar with nightmares. She has had them since the animal attack. What she is unfamiliar with is nightmares about being lost in the woods with viscous black liquid coating her hands and an eerie rattling noise following her wherever she goes.

* * *

She could have graduated early had she not missed so many classes due to her... _antics_. Still, she is a smart girl and a terrific student, so she has a relatively empty timetable. The rambunctious Coach hands her over to a Scott McCall, who is all tan skin and cute dimples. He brings her to her first class - AP Biology, which they share, and points out main hallways along the way.

* * *

She hears a faint rattling noise as she places her books in her locker after class. She looks around for the source, and jumps when a girl slams her locker door shut a few feet away. Lydia studies her. Slim frame, limp hair, tired eyes. She thinks she saw the girl  _shiver_  as she shuffled away from the lockers, but is distracted by a voice behind her.

It’s Scott McCall and another girl who is also in their AP Bio class. From the way Scott’s arm is draped over the girl’s shoulders, Lydia guesses they are an item.

Scott introduces his girlfriend - Kira - to Lydia, then asks,

“Would you like to watch our lacrosse practice after school? We can find someone to watch with you if you don’t want to be alone.”

She finds it sweet that they are offering to find her some company, but she made the decision before coming to Beacon Hills that she would keep her head down in senior year and hope to avoid, well, anything. Blackouts and recurring nightmares weren’t the only problems she had where she came from. She had also gone through things that were more normal, more  _human_.

She smiles but shakes her head politely. “Thanks, but I’m not really a sports person.”

She hurries away before she gets invited to any more social activities.

* * *

Given her academic goals, she should be aghast at herself for almost dozing off in class.

She’s tired from the previous night. It was her second nightmare this week. They’ve been occurring more frequently since she moved to Beacon Hills, and she’s telling herself it’s due to anxiety from moving to a new place. Regardless, she was unable to go back to sleep after waking up gasping for breath from running from something unknown, tripping and falling amongst the roots of a large tree.

It’s the fire drill that jolts her awake, her head seconds away from dropping onto her desk. Everyone around her is gathering their things and she hurries to do the same. As she rushes out of the classroom, she hears the faint rattling again. She slows down, searching for the source, and then hears her name. She looks up, expecting to see a caring classmate who noticed the new girl trailing behind, but everyone is already exiting through the double doors.

* * *

The nightmares are gaining clarity. She’s still lost in the woods, the creepy rattling following her. A figure emerges from the shadows - a man in some steampunk armour and a cape wearing a strange mask. She turns and runs blindly into the trees until she reaches a large stump. A burnt body lies amongst its roots.

* * *

Someone shakes her awake. Lydia curls up further, the warm dirt dragging against her skin. “Ten more minutes,” she mumbles, burying her face into the ground. Her bed smells of foliage and dead leaves and -

“Hello?”

She slowly blinks her eyes open. Illuminated against the dark night sky are three blurry faces. Faces she does not recognise, even when they come into focus.

Three boys. One crouched next to her, the other two behind him, bending over his back. They all look rather young, perhaps only a year or two younger than her.

Then the dirty reality hits her: she blacked out, again.

Tomorrow she when she enters the school building, every step she takes will be watched with wary glances.

Lydia pushes herself onto her elbows. There’s dirt beneath her and shadowy trees above.

“Are you okay?” The blond boy asks.  _He’s handsome_ , Lydia thinks briefly - the guy had pretty lidded eyes, smooth fair skin, defined cheekbones and curly, tousled hair.

“Where am I?” she rasps. The side of her neck stings, and she brings a hand up to rub at it, finding a slightly inflamed area, like a swollen insect bite, but this one hurts and the skin around it feels raw. It was probably red.

“Somewhere in the preserve,” Blond replies, eyes fixated on where she is rubbing her neck. Lydia pulls some of her hair over her shoulder as she moves her hand, suddenly feeling subconscious.

“How did I get here?”

A different boy, shorter, with duller hair and the remains of a baby face, answers. “You crawled out of that hole.”

Lydia follows his eyes to the giant pit dug into the forest floor right next to her.

Pain shoots up her side when she tries to sit up fully. Looking down, she finds that her old wound has reopened and is bleeding profusely. She suddenly gets an image of the masked man, flickering in and out of her mind, across her vision. Her head aches.

“Are you okay?” the third boy asks. He has dark skin and a kind voice. His face shows concern, not the curious suspicion of his companions.

Lydia puts on what she hopes is a brave face. “I’m fine,” she tells them, pressing a hand over her bleeding scar. “It’s an old would, it must have reopened when I fell.”

None of the boys look convinced. In fact, her answer only seems to make them more suspicious, and when she tries to sit up again, only the be overcome by a wave of dizziness that sends her collapsing into Blond boy’s arms, it probably didn’t do her any favours.

“She doesn’t look very fine,” she hears the second boy say right before she passes out.

* * *

Somehow, the boys get her to the hospital. Her side wound needs treatment and she is quickly whisked away into an operating room and given anaesthesia. The nurse tells her to slowly countdown as the drug takes effect. Her vision slowly blurs and starts flickering. The rattling noise rings in her ears. When she blinks, more men in masks - three in total - have surrounded her. She pauses, and they tell her to “keep counting”. Her mind is too fuzzy to do otherwise.

* * *

She dreams of the tree stump again. This time it is on fire. She turns around as the three masked men approach. One grabs her by the neck. She screams herself awake.

* * *

When she wakes up, she is in the hospital and a deputy is stationed outside her room, ready to question her. Later in the afternoon, someone’s agonising screams wake her up from an afternoon nap. She’s annoyed at first, then she realises she would have screamed herself awake anyway because she had been having the nightmare again. This time, she was following someone else through the woods.

The doctors want her to stay overnight to monitor her. That evening, she is washing her face in the bathroom when the lights start flickering. She thinks she might still have some anaesthesia in her system because her eyes glow briefly in the mirror before the lights go out. She quickly leaves the room.

Half the lights in the hallway are out and the rest are flickering, throwing the corridor into a dim yellow light. She hears the rattling coming down the hall, getting louder and louder, and suddenly one of the men in the masks appears a few feet from her, flickering in and out of the semi darkness. He stares at Lydia for a second before turning into an operating room.

She doesn’t know why, but she dashes after the man into the room and promptly crashes into a body. In the dark, she makes out a red hoodie, and then looks up to find a very normal, unmasked human face. She stares, mouth gaping open, while the person immediately starts talking.

“Hey, uh...the power’s weird so I was just about to...”

He seems to be around her age, with messy dark hair sticking up above his head, a sharp jawline, upturned nose, and moles scattered across his skin. She can’t really tell the colour of his eyes in the dim lighting but they bore into her nonetheless.

“Wait,” he says. “You’re from my school, I know you - Lydia, right? I’m Stiles, I sit behind you in English -”

"What the hell is a Stiles?” she blurts, still in shock. “Where’s the man?”

Stiles furrows his brow. “What man?”

“The man in the mask.”

An unreadable expression passes across his face and suddenly the rattling noise starts up again, softer this time. Lydia tilts her head as she tries to pinpoint the source and Stiles tilts his as he studies her. He steps aside as she follows the sound further into the room.

“Lydia?” Stiles asks, his voice wary. “What do you know about the men in the masks?”

She doesn’t answer him, too busy focusing on the sound, which is now coming from the surgical monitor. The rattling changes as she brings her head closer, turning into a low whisper. Lydia hears Stiles calling her name in the background but she squeezes her eyes shut and focuses on the grinding voice.

" _Your condition worsens_ ," a man says. His deep voice sounds like machinery grinding against each other.

She opens her eyes to a different scene. She is back in the operating room, but Stiles is gone and there’s someone - a teenager - lying on the table. The men in the masks stand over him. A metal-gloved hand reaches out and peels back the guy’s skin, revealing the blue flesh underneath, cackling with electricity.

There’s a jolt on her left shoulder - an electric shock. Lydia gasps and the scene vanishes, leaving her alone in the room with Stiles. It’s his hand on her shoulder as he continues to call her name.

“Someone...electricity...” she manages.

Stiles looks like he wants to tell her something, but he nods, retracts his hand from her skin and hurries out of the room.

He pauses at the door.

“I wish I could explain but I really have to go…check…” he gestures wildly with his hands, as if they make up for the words he cannot say.

“Just stay in your room and you’ll be safe, okay?”

And then he’s gone.

Her shoulder burns at the loss of contact.


	2. Methodology: Ashes in the Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lydia finds herself entangled in a supernatural mystery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter is THREE TIMES LONGER than the first, which was not intended _at all_.
> 
> The next chapter, for one chapter only, will have POVs from more than 1 character, but...I'm gonna study for midterms and work on other fics for now, so it will be a while before this fic gets updated again. To see my other works, check out my profile or go to [raspberrylimonade](raspberrylimonade.tumblr.com/tagged/par-moi) on tumblr. You can also chat with me on [twitter (stlnskissmartin)](twitter.com/stlnskissmartin) if you prefer.
> 
> Thanks for all the support for this fic so far, and I hope you guys like this chapter.

She misses a day of school and when she comes back the following day, no one pays any attention to her. No one but Scott McCall and Stiles, and their little group of friends.

She pretends not to notice Scott and Stiles watching her from afar as Kira asks if she’s okay. Pretends she didn’t notice that Malia, the girl who approached her in math class, happens to be the same girl who has lunch with Scott, Kira and Stiles. Pretends she doesn’t feel Stiles’ eyes on the back of her head during English.

Stiles. The boy has a weird aura around him. Whenever she sneaks a glance at him, she can almost see a dark cloud gathering around him, pressing down on his broad shoulders.

She doesn’t know how she knows, but something macabre has touched his life. The boy has experienced _death_. Maybe more than once. She pictures the bright red hoodie he wore at the hospital and wonders how much blood he has seen.

She shuts down her morbid curiosity. She can’t get tangled up with Stiles and his suspicious friends.

* * *

 

She falls asleep in the corner of the library and wakes up to find it devoid of students. There is no lacrosse match tonight nor is there a late-night study session, so she supposes the school is empty. She briefly wonders if the last person to leave thought of waking her up. Then again, it’s not like she’s been making acquaintances at her new school.

She checks her phone to see if her mother might have called her. There’s no cell signal.

As she makes her way towards the parking lot, she notices another car parked at the side of the school building. A man gets out and starts calling after her.

_Head down, and walk fast_ , she thinks, just trying to get to her car.

Behind her, the man picks up pace.

“Excuse me!” he yells after her. “Beacon Hills Police Department!”

She makes it to the corner of the parking lot, illuminated by a street lamp. She turns to face the man behind her. He’s not in uniform, and his vehicle is definitely not a police cruiser, but he pulls out a wallet and holds out his identity card, keeping it in front of him so Lydia can read.

_Jordan Parrish_ is his name.

“Are you a student here?” he asks. Lydia nods.

“What were you doing in the school this late? There are no events happening here tonight.”

“I just fell asleep in the library. No one woke me up. I’m just on my way home now.” She points to her car, sitting alone in the middle of the parking lot.

Parrish frowns, as if realising he should have noticed a lone car in the lot before assuming the building was empty.

“Did you see anyone else in the school?” he questions.

Lydia shakes her head again, looking at her feet. “No,” she answers. “Can I go now? I really didn’t plan to be out this late.”

Silence.

Lydia looks up to find that Parrish isn’t looking at her anymore. He is staring straight ahead with a blank look in his eyes.

Then he pockets his wallet, turns around, and starts walking back to his car.

“Um, excuse me!” Lydia calls after him. “I assume I can leave?”

He doesn’t respond, only gets in his car and drives away.

Lydia frowns, turns, and treks towards her own car, trying to make sense of what just happened. She’s so caught up in her thoughts, she neglects to look at where she’s going, so she stumbles over the corner of a curb and -

“Whoa! Oh my g-- Lydia?”

She blinks, stumbles backwards, finds herself face to face with Scott McCall and the dark-skinned boy from the woods.

“It’s Lydia, right?” the boy asks.

“What are you doing here?” Scott asks at the same time. “Who did you see?”

She’s really, really confused. “I - uh - I just - ”

But then there’s that rattling sound again, louder than ever. The boy’s eyes widen at something behind her. Lydia whips around to see one of the masked men at the end of the corner.

_Lydia_ it seems to call to her.

She stares at it, almost entranced, watching it flicker as it moved towards them.

Then the boy was pulling her into a classroom and Scott was pushing past her, throwing himself at the man. She swears she hears him _growl_ right before the other boy slams the classroom door shut.

“What was that?!” Lydia wants to shriek, but the _bang!_ of the wooden door crashing into its frame resonates too loudly in her ears.

Fire explodes behind her eyes. She sees a car - no, it’s not a car, it’s more like a SUV or a jeep. It lies overturned on the ground and she can barely make out the shape of someone’s head sticking out of the broken driver’s side window, silhouetted against the burning store in the background.

“It’s okay,” someone’s voice echoes.

Lydia snaps back to reality. The boy from the woods is patting her shoulder awkwardly. Scott McCall stands behind him, leant over the two of them.

“It’s okay,” Scott repeats. “It’s gone now.”

“What was _it_?” Lydia whispers harshly.

Scott and the boy share a look, as if they are not too sure themselves.

Finally, the younger boy answers her question.

“We call it a dread doctor,” he says slowly, and Lydia nearly scoffs. What is this, a children’s book? But something, maybe the severity of his tone, or the dark look on Scott’s face, or even Lydia’s own intuition, gives her pause.

Scott seems to sense her hesitance to believe them. “We don’t really know much about them either, but we do know the doctors are taking people. Teenagers, like us,” he explains. “So we need to know if anyone else was in school.”

“There was the deputy outside.” Her voice warbles as she speaks. “He asked me the same thing and I told him I didn’t see anyone and then he just left.”

"You didn’t see anyone else? Two students?” the boy presses.

She shakes her head for what feels like the hundredth time that night. “No. I fell asleep in the library. Everyone left before me.”

There’s a bit of despair in the boy’s eyes when he hears her answer, as if he was hoping to hear something different. She looks down and away from his disappointed expression.

“You must have a lot of questions,” Scott is now saying. “And I promise, we’ll answer them as much as we can soon. Mason can bring you home, and anything you want to ask, we can talk tomorrow, okay?”

From the way he was speaking, one would think he was consoling a frightened animal. Perhaps Lydia was not so different from those.

_Animals_.

Something in her brain clicked. She didn’t know why or how, but she just _knew_ -

“The animal clinic,” she breathes. “This town has an animal clinic, right?”

She already knows she is right. She owns a dog, after all. She had to do research before moving here.

“I think there was an accident,” she whispers, horrified.

* * *

 

So apparently _werewolves_ and _druids_ and _kitsunes_ exist, along with heaven knows how many other kinds of supernatural creatures, and they so happen to like this godforsaken town because of some special tree in the preserve.

(She doesn’t tell them about her nightmares. Not yet.)

She is a _chimera_ now. Somebody’s science experiment. The masked _dread doctors_ cut her open and did something to her and she didn’t even know. But the worst part is, they don’t know what she is. Scott is a werewolf, Kira is a fox, Malia is a coyote, but they don’t know what kind of creature she is.

(She can feel Stiles studying her and tells herself it’s because he is intrigued by how she somehow knew he was attacked last night, nothing else.)

Even in the world of supernatural creatures, she is still an anomaly. An oddity. A freak.

As a small consolation, they cannot explain Corey’s powers either. He has the power of invisibility, something, Lydia surmises from the “pack”’s questioning, they have not encountered before. Still, he also has improved speed and strength, making him more _like them_ than she is.

For someone whose treatment for supernatural scorpion venom was interrupted by crazy doctors who then did supernatural surgery on him, Corey looks to be in very good shape. Probably his supernatural healing, another quality Lydia has not been given. The swelling on her neck, apparently from having a needle stuck into her, is gone, but the skin around it is still red and feels bruised.

Still, she supposes, it’s better than being kidnapped. That is why they have gathered in Scott McCall’s bedroom, to read a book that will unlock their suppressed memories and hopefully learn enough about the dread doctors to find out where a Liam and a Hayden are.

(She doesn’t mention the name she heard during the hospital blackout.)

She can picture the doctors in her mind. They had taken her during the fire drill, cut her open, and then buried her in the woods to _incubate_. She had _crawled out a hole_ as if it was some form of rebirth and that was when Mason and Liam and the blond boy had found her. The doctors had checked on her again, during her surgery to close up her old wound.

Unfortunately for Liam and Hayden, she doesn’t remember anything about her time in wherever the dread doctors are hiding out. She sits in the corner of Scott’s bedroom, useless, as Corey tries to focus on the details the book was helping him recall.

At least until Scott McCall storms into the room and sticks his claws behind Corey’s neck.

Lydia jumps to her feet. Screams. Freezes. Stiles is suddenly next to her, slowly coaxing her to sit down. He has one hand on her shoulder and the other on her back, drawing the tension out of her body. She collapses back into the chair, still shaken that seemingly gentle Scott McCall, the hardworking AP bio student who aspires to be a vet, would force his way into someone’s mind like that.

After what seems like an eternity, Scott removes his claws from Corey’s neck and starts drawing what he saw. Lydia, peering over Stiles’ shoulder, glimpses his sketch and immediately recognises the place.

“It’s an old water treatment plant,” she says, the same time Stiles does. He gives her a long look over his shoulder.

“My mum and I drove past when we moved in,” she explains. Her voice feels unnaturally small. She backs away under Stiles’ intense gaze.

Scott turns to face her. “Do you know anything about it?” he asks. The urgency in his voice makes her wonder about the relationship between Scott, Liam and Hayden. “Do you remember anything?”

He takes a hasty step towards her and Lydia instinctively takes another step back, inhaling sharply as her back hits the wall. Luckily for her, Stiles steps in between them, hands held in front of him to hold his best friend off.

“She doesn’t, okay?” Stiles tells him sternly. “She was probably knocked out throughout most of it.”

Lydia watches his back, oddly touched that he was defending her. Her neck prickles at the thought of claws digging underneath her skin and into the deepest recesses of her mind. She shivers, and Stiles glances over his shoulder as if he sensed it.

Suddenly, she wants to stay close to Stiles, not keep her distance. The dark cloud has lifted around him, and instead there’s a protective bubble she can crawl into.

He turns back and the moment is over.

“We’re wasting time,” Stiles tells Scott, his voice softer, exhausted. “Go find Liam. If we figure something out we’ll tell you.”

Scott simply nods, and is followed out of the room by Mason and Malia.

Stiles’ shoulders sag once they leave, which makes Lydia realise how tense he has been. They are all high strung, of course, having lost two members of their “pack”, but Stiles is particularly jittery. She’d figured out pretty quickly that he was the smartass, the one the “pack” looked to for solutions, the one who always ran his mouth with theories and suspicions. She wondered if he knew something he couldn’t bring himself to tell, pictured the metaphorical cloud getting heavier around him with the burden of knowledge.

Then Corey is leaving too. He looks mad, and he has the right to be. He lets the door slam shut before Stiles and Theo can stop him.

Stiles sighs and plonks himself on a couch, long, messy limbs sprawling everywhere.

“Don’t you have to meet your dad?” Theo asks him. “To stop whoever is taking the dead bodies?”

Lydia doesn’t know if she should be listening, but Theo’s words pique her interest. _Dead bodies_. Like she dreamed.

Stiles raises his brows at Theo - like it is incredulous that the other boy is speaking to him - then his eyes flicker over to Lydia, standing a good ten feet away from either of them.

“I’m not leaving her here with you.” There’s a tone of finality in his voice, with a shade of snark.

“She saved my life too, okay? I don’t know how she knew we were in danger, but it’s because of her we got help,” Theo starts. “You think I’m gonna repay her by what, stabbing her in the back?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I think you would do,” Stiles fires back immediately. Then his eyes fall back on her. He sits forward, leaning his forearms on his knees, and his gaze turns contemplative.

Lydia looks away, uncomfortable from the sudden attention.

“Last night,” Stiles begins. His voice is low. Lydia can almost hear the wheels turning in his head. “You knew we were in danger. You felt it. How?”

“I-I don’t know,” she wavers. “I just saw it. In my mind.”

“Like a memory?” Stiles supplies. “A dream?”

_Dream_. Lydia’s head snaps up.

“Why?” she asks. “Do you know something about it?”

He sighs. “No, but I know some things we can do about it.”

* * *

 

_This is ridiculous. I don’t know why I’m doing this_.

Stiles fidgets next to her. She can’t see him (her eyes are closed) but she can hear him... _feel_ him. He is hovering so close she can sense the air shifting as his body does.

_Maybe this would be easier if he would just. stop. moving._

She hears an intake of breath near her left ear and drops the pencil in her hand.

“No, Stiles, this isn’t working.”

“I haven’t even asked - ”

“You were going to.” She opens her eyes only to shoot him an annoyed glare.

Stiles waves his arms aimlessly. “Well maybe it would work if you just concentrate!”

“Maybe I could if you weren’t breathing down my neck and distracting me!”

There’s a snort, and both their heads snap to the side where Theo has taken over the couch, hiding an amused smirk.

“Oh I’m sorry,” the other boy says, waving them off. “This is way more entertaining than the ouija board.”

“Well maybe that didn’t work because you were doing it with us,” Stiles snapped. He twists his body around, looking for the discarded board. “We should try it again without his bad energy interfering - ”

“Stiles!”

He literally halts mid-movement, arm still outstretched, and cranes his neck to look at her.

He looks hilarious, and Lydia forgets her annoyance as she tries to bite back her laugh.

She settles for an exasperated sigh. “It’s not going to work. I’m not a psychic.”

“You’re something, okay!” Stiles practically yells at her. “Look, we can’t throw you in an ice bath so can you try that again please?”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Theo interrupts, his tone serious this time. “You never said anything about an ice bath. What does that do?”

Stiles is standing straight now, body stiff... _defensive_.

“Different things,” he mutters. “In our case, lower the body temperature until you’re almost dead so you can access your subconscious.”

The two boys stare off. The tension between them has not escaped Lydia. Stiles clearly dislikes Theo, who Lydia must admit, seems a bit too charismatic for his own good.

Right now, though, the mounting tension in the room barely registers in her mind, because she knows what Stiles is trying to do, and she knows another way to do it.

“Hypnosis,” she realises. She looks up at Stiles. “You have to hypnotise me.”

Stiles’ eye twitches. “You don’t want to try automatic writing but you want me to _hypnotise_ you?”

She’s seriously wondering why she was ready to bury herself in his arms just twenty minutes ago. The guy is a ball of snark and it sets her on edge.

Good thing she can snark right back.

“Maybe the automatic writing would actually work _if_ I had something to focus on _like_ in hypnosis,” Lydia replies through gritted teeth. Stiles emits a strange, annoyed whine from the back of his throat and jerks his arms around like he is having a spasm, but he eventually relents.

So she shuts herself in Scott’s bathroom (she specified that Stiles wasn’t going to be in there with her if he wanted this to work) with a lighter. She sits on a damp rug just in case, flicks the lighter open, and stares at the flame.

She feels oddly calm.

Smoke wafts from the flame, and Lydia flinches as the burnt smell hits her. She loses focus on the light source, and that’s when she realises she’s no longer in Scott’s bathroom, but in some dark cellar. There’s a cold liquid beneath her legs, but when she looks down, it’s not Scott’s wet floor rug, but a puddle of silverish substance.

Mercury.

“No...no, no, no, NO!”

The desperate cry behind her causes her to drop the lighter, setting the liquid metal on fire, but if the flames scorch her skin, Lydia doesn’t realises. She’s frozen in shock from what she turns to find.

There’s a metal gate, and beyond that, one of the masked men - a Dread Doctor - stands over a boy barely Lydia’s age. Mercury pours from his nose and ears. He screams and thrashes to no avail. Lydia’s breath hitches when the Doctor plunges a needle into his neck.

The boy’s screams stop. The Doctor deposits him on the floor and ducks out through a hole in the far wall. The boy’s body tips forward, revealing the two stumps on his back, buzzing...buzzing...then they stop. And Lydia _screams_.

The flames seem to be fuelled by her voice, rising up around her, swallowing the room with their fiery tendrils. The cellar elongates into a hallway. She sees a silhouette of a man at the end and turns to run, but an invisible forces wraps around her torso and pulls her back -

“Lydia! Lydia! Hey hey hey, it’s alright.”

She screams herself hoarse, fighting against the two arms trying to wrap around her from behind.

“It’s alright,” a voice whispers. “Hey, hey Lydia, it’s alright.”

It’s Stiles.

Lydia takes a huge gasp of breath, fingers curling against the tiled floor she had been wildly flinging her hands against, as if trying to dig a hole out of the bathroom, the base of her palms rubbed raw.

Stiles’ hands are gently rubbing up and down the sides of her arms now. He scoots from behind her to her left as he slowly coaxes her to sit back on her heels. Lydia is so exhausted from screaming that she topples sideways, knocking into Stiles’ body. His hands grip her shoulders gently as he stabilises her.

The only sound now is her panting, and Lydia realises they are waiting for her to speak.

“There was a basement,” she rasps. “Or a cellar. And there was...there was mercury, everywhere.”

“Did you see them?” Theo’s voice probes. “Liam and Hayden?”

Lydia glances up, locating the other boy in the doorway of the bathroom. The door has been flung wide open, thrown apart with force, and Lydia’s eyes shift to Stiles, who’d gotten to her side faster than a werewolf did.

She swallows. “No, I didn’t, but...they were there. I just know it.”

“Are they alive?” Stiles asks, his voice much softer despite the fact that he is speaking almost next to her ear.

Lydia thinks, letting her gut feeling take over. She nods. “They are hurt, but not dead. I think...I think they were trying to help someone else. The doctors killed him. And - ”

“Okay, Lydia, did you see _where_ they were?” Theo questions urgently.

She squeezes her eyes shut. Pictures the dank cellar, the metal gate, the wall with the hole smashed through. Describes it to them.

There’s an instant shift in the air, like both boys come to the same realisation. Theo says something about the _garuda_ and _noise complaint_ and then launches out of the doorframe. Stiles tries to jump up and hurry after him, but is tugged back down by Lydia.

“The dead body,” she whispers. “Someone is going to take the dead body.”

Stiles nods rapidly, trying to pull her to her feet. “Yeah Lydia, we know. C’mon, do you think you can stand?”

“There’s one at the hospital, isn’t there?” she asks.

Stiles stills. “How did you know that?”

“I saw him,” Lydia answers, folding her lips. “At the hospital, right before you pulled me out.”

“ _He?_ ”

“Stiles!” Theo bellows from below.

Stiles doesn’t react, his eyes remain focused on Lydia.

“He’s going to set the place on fire,” Lydia tells him. “He always sets it on fire.”

Stiles eyes widen. He turns around to yell at Theo to _go ahead, I have to tell my dad about the new body_. Then he wraps his arms around Lydia’s arms and quite literally _hauls_ her up, letting her lean on him until she finds her footing.

* * *

 

Stiles guides her to his jeep, hand hovering over the small of her back in a way that lets her know he is there without applying any pressure, like they are in a Rockettes performance. He opens the door for her, holds her hand to help her climb into the passenger’s seat.

He has to start the jeep with a screwdriver. She is surprised it is even still standing given that it was flipped over just the night before. From the dents and scratches visible from a mile away, she guesses last night wasn’t the first time. It’s a miracle it’s even in one piece.

The evening passes in a blur. They go to the hospital and meet Stiles’ father, who happens to be the Sheriff. She learns that the deputy who wandered off from the school that night - Jordan Parrish - is a hellhound, of all things, and Stiles confirms he is the body snatcher when they find his nametag in the morgue.

At some point, she tells Stiles about the tree. She doesn’t tell him about her dreams, spinning the story to sound like it was a detail from her hypnotic vision that she overlooked at first. Stiles swore the moment the word ‘tree’ passed her lips, and then he had dragged her back to his jeep and had been driving around the preserve since.

“It’s too dark,” Lydia states for the fifth time. “We’re not going to find it like this. We should come back tomorrow.”

Stiles sighs and runs a hand over his face.

“Why are you so worried about finding the bodies?” Lydia asks him. “I mean, you should be trying to prevent there from being _more_ bodies.”

Stiles sighs again. “Because one of them…”

The buzzing of a phone interrupts their conversation. In one swift movement, Stiles pulls his phone out of his pocket, turns on loudspeaker, drops it in his lap and has his hand back on the wheel.

“Yeah, buddy.”

“Stiles, where are you?” The voice that speaks through the phone is muffled, but Lydia recognises it as Scott’s.

“We’re looking for the Nemeton,” Stiles answers. Lydia recognises the name of the tree. Stiles hadn’t told her the details, only that it was a source of supernatural problems. “That’s where Parrish is taking the bodies. Scott, Parrish is the one taking the bodies. He’s taking them to the Nemeton.”

“Is Lydia with you?”

“Yeah, she’s right here.”

“And she’s...okay?”

Stiles gives her a one-over. “Physically, yeah. Scott, what’s wrong?”

“It’s the mercury,” Scott tells them. “Like how we found Tracy. When they start bleeding mercury, that’s when the doctors will kill them.”

Lydia’s hand instinctively shifts to her neck, feeling the bump of the needlepoint. The doctors had injected something into her when they made her what she was, and they would kill her the same way.

“It’s okay, I’ll keep an eye on her,” Stiles tells Scott, his eyes transfixed on Lydia as he speaks. “You found Liam and Hayden?”

“Theo found them,” comes Scott’s reply, and even in the dark, Lydia can see Stiles’ dramatic eye roll.

“ _Lydia_ told him where to find them,” he mutters. “Alright, Scotty, we’re heading back now. See you in a few.”

The call disconnects, and Stiles mutters something about Theo again.

“You don’t trust him.” Lydia states. It isn’t a question.

“Nope.”

“Do you trust me?”

“I don’t know...”

She looks at her hands in her lap. She sees morbid things and she doesn’t know why. Even she is not sure she can trust herself.

Something warm envelopes her shoulder. She tilts her head to find it is Stiles’ hand. Her eyes drift up and meet his, warm and golden, unwavering from her.

“But I want to help you figure this out,” he tells her. His voice is soft, earnest, _sincere_. She’s never had anyone speak to her this way before, and so finds herself speechless.

She looks into his eyes and slowly drowns in molten gold.

The jeep shakes as it rolls over a bump in the road. Lydia jerks back, only then realising how much she was leaning towards Stiles, who is still watching her, as if he didn’t register the bump at all.

Lydia clears her throat awkwardly. “Keep your eyes on the road.”

* * *

 

When Lydia got her own car, she made it a point to arrive at school early and snag herself a lot. For two years she had witnessed the endless queues out of parking lots, and had decided that she would not put up with that. Usually, she would use the extra time before classes to check her makeup in the mirror.

The morning after they found Liam and Hayden, Lydia was trying to at least keep her normal school routine when Stiles Stilinski steamrolled his jeep into the parking lot next to hers and invited her to skip school with him. She indulged him for one day, since her mother had a full class schedule that day, but when he tried to do the same the following day, she put her foot down and insisted they would only go supernatural-tree-hunting after class.

Today he is ten minutes late. Lydia has already checked her makeup five times (perfect, obviously, even chimeras need to look good), and if Stiles doesn’t show up soon, they will be late for class.

He’s _gonna be late for class_ , Lydia thinks, _I’m not going to get a late slip because of him. Or his jeep, probably, which takes twenty minutes to start on a good day._

She grabs her bag and steps out of her car, only to realise that the reason Stiles isn’t here is because she is not at school, but rather, in the middle of the preserve.

Her skin prickles. This is exactly how Scott got bitten, in the middle of the woods. He had told her the story after AP bio one day, and it was eerily similar to her own.

Her hand smooths her blouse down. She can feel the ridges of her scar through the fabric.

The town she’d left was not much different from Beacon Hills. It was small and located near a forested area. She and her friends had gotten drunk at a school dance and dared each other to go into the woods. The next thing she knew, she was waking up in the hospital with a giant scar on her side. When she got back to school, someone took pictures of her skin in the girls locker room and suddenly she was the school outcast. The people she thought were her friends shunned her.

The police told her she had probably provoked a particularly large fox, or even a young bear. Whatever animal it was, it had bitten her twice, because now it was the reason she was a walking, talking science experiment.

A twig snaps beneath her foot, causing Lydia to jump. While she was lost in thought, she had wandered even further from her car. She spins around to look for it, and her eyes fall on a line of smaller trees to her right.

There’s a breeze blowing through the preserve and she is standing downwind from the trees. When their leaves rustle, she can almost hear the whispery voices, beckoning her to come closer.

There’s an icy chill in her bones that is the wind is certainly not strong enough to cause, and Lydia finds herself mumbling “oh my god” with each step she takes.

When she finally steps between two of the trees, she has to clasp her hand over her mouth, stifling the very human shriek that nearly escapes. There’s a small clearing in front of here and in the middle, the giant stump of a tree, bodies littered around its roots.

One of them happens to be facing her. A boy with curly dark hair, his shirt stained with blood around the stomach, staring at her with dead eyes.

She jumps again when her phone rings, and she fumbles to answer it.

“Lydia! Thank god, where are you? I called you _seventeen times_ \- ”

“Stiles,” she breathes. She doesn’t even question how he got her number. She’s never been so relieved to hear someone’s voice. “I found the dead bodies.”

“ _What?!_ ” She hears some shuffling and a _clang_ that tells her Stiles just shut the door of his jeep. “Okay Lydia you need to get the hell out of there _right now_. There’s another dead body, which means Parrish is going to be taking it there and he doesn’t know what he is doing so Lydia do not get in his way. Lydia!”

She doesn’t need him to tell her twice, turning away from the pile of dead bodies and running towards her car, feeling the dead eyes of the curly-haired chimera on her back every step of the way.

She somehow ends up back in school, and glances around the lot. There’s no blue jeep in sight, although there are a few police cruisers parked on the street nearby.

The radio clock tells her it’s almost three thirty, which means Scott might be going to the library to study.

The school building is in terrible shape, with entire hallways closed from the destruction, but Lydia cannot care less about that right now except that that, along with the swarm of students trying to leave the collapsing building as soon as possible, is slowing her run to the library. She bursts into the unusually empty space, calling Scott’s name.

“Scott’s on his way.”

She whips around and comes face to face with Theo. He is smiling his usual smile, but this time it’s more sinister than charismatic, and he is standing too close. As close as he can get without touching her.

Theo’s lips curl even further into a snarl. “But he won’t find you here.”

Lydia feels a _whoosh_ , and a force against the side of her head, then nothing.

* * *

 

Lydia wakes up in the library. It’s dark outside. She must have fallen asleep again.

She picks up her bag and is heading out when she hears a hissing from amongst the shelves. She stills and turns to look down the aisle next to her. At first, she sees nothing.

Then a dark shape darts out of the shadows, baring several rows of sharp teeth in its jaws.

Lydia shrieks and stumbles backwards before taking off in a run, heading for the stacks on the opposite side of the library. She darts behind a shelf presses herself into the shadows under the staircase. The stacks tremble as the creature runs across the top of them before leaping onto the second-floor landing and scuttling off.

Lydia leans forward, tilting her head to peer through the gaps in the staircase. Not seeing any movement, she slowly eases along the length of the bookshelf. When she reaches the end of the aisle, she’ll have to make a run for the door.

Something clamps down on her left shoulder, and she screams in pain as what feels like ten thousand needles embed themselves in her flesh. She is yanked backwards and feels the wooden shelf splintering against her back as she is thrown onto the floor. She catches a glimpse of the dead curly-haired chimera looking over her, his eyes all white, before she is scrambling to her feet again.

She somehow finds a scaffolding in front of her and climbs, faster than her heeled boots should have allowed her. The structure shakes as the chimera starts climbing too, causing her foot to slip. She dangles in the air for a moment, clutching onto a horizontal metal bar with both arms, then her body slams into the scaffold again.

She finds her footing and reaches for the next bar, but then something grabs her ankle and an excruciating pain shoots up her leg.

She looks down to see the chimera’s hand clamped around her ankle and whimpers as he tightens his grip. He raises his other hand, showing off the mouth full of jagged teeth in the palm, and grabs her other leg, pulling her down, down, down towards him...

* * *

Lydia jerks awake on the dirty floor of a dimly lit room, screaming Stiles’ name. There’s a pounding in her head from where Theo had hit her.

She pushes herself up and looks around. There’s an operating table to one side and a row of tanks behind her, vague shapes floating in the murky liquid.

She starts to get to her feet, but suddenly Theo himself is there, forcing her back down. He pulls a tube from one of the tanks and Lydia feels the needle go into the side of her neck. Whatever Theo injects her with makes her go limp, and she drops to the floor again.

“He was going to kill Stiles,” she pleads. “I need to tell them, he was going to kill Stiles.”

“And Stiles actually killed him,” Theo says conversationally. He has moved out of her line of sight, but she can hear him looking for something, maybe deciding which tools to torture her with.

He finds what he is looking for and moves towards the tanks behind Lydia, fiddling with the wires. “That’s why you were drawn to Stiles. He had an aura of death around him, and you were made precisely to detect death.”

“I have to say, I really envied you, Lydia. You were special to the Dread Doctors because you were a _banshee_. For months, I was their only success. Their prized possession. You were just a side project, something they just tried for fun. And you actually worked. But that’s not all.”

She sees his legs walking around before he is squatting in front of her. There is a large syringe in his hand filled with an unknown substance. Lydia shivers at the sight.

Theo reaches a hand out and strokes Lydia’s cheek, pulling her face up to his.

“You made Stiles _care_ about you,” he says. “Stiles, the one person I couldn’t get to trust me. How did you do it?”

He chuckles to himself, his hands moves into her hair and down the back of her head.

“It doesn’t matter. That’s not what I really want to know from you. I want to know _this -_ ”

And then his claws pierce her neck.

* * *

_Darkness._

_He is floating in pure darkness._

_His wounds are still bleeding, but he does not feel any pain._

_He wonders if waking up earlier was a dream. If being revived, licking his wounds, patching himself up, they were all just his brain’s last neural activity._

_He wonders if this is what it is like to die._

_Maybe he will see Allison again._

_Allison._

_She wouldn’t have let things come to this._

_Suddenly, the darkness becomes tangible, an infinite thick blanket, constricting around him, suffocating him as it begins to solidify into walls which begin to rattle, and through the darkness, a piercing scream._

Scott gasps, finding himself collapsed in his hallway. His house is silent but the scream still rings in his ears.

_Lydia_.

 

 


End file.
